About Us
The lehenga that started it all. Worn 3x by me and borrowed 5x by others!
The
Inspiration
The
Vision
The idea was inspired by my own experiences purchasing Indian party wear. I love fashion and would have a need to wear something uniquely beautiful at any of the Indian weddings/parties I would attend. This usually meant I spent multiple hundreds of dollars on a given outfit. I would also buy dozens of fancy outfits at once on my trips to India as I did not go very often and had to do my shopping in bulk for the season. I’d be ecstatic with my purchases, and my sense of style would be further confirmed when the compliments started rolling in at the parties. However, I would rarely wear the dresses more than twice, despite how much I loved them, if others had already seen me in it! And so, the dresses would sit in my closet. If they were lucky, the dresses would get borrowed by my aunts, cousins, and friends who had other parties to go to. If I didn’t have enough new styles in my closet, I would raid my friends’ closets as well.
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In my ancestral language, we have a saying “Paisa vasool.” It means that the purchased item was worth its price. It is the ultimate Indian idea of good value, not to be confused with miserliness. It indicates a satisfaction in extracting every drop of consumptive value from each dollar. My purchases would be validated as “Paisa Vasool” if I had gotten a subjectively satisfactory amount of compliments when I was wearing it or if they were borrowed subsequently by others, validating my sense of style. But let’s be honest, the dress would be worth its money if I could actually get paid for it when it was borrowed!
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Thus, the idea of ClosetRaani was born. All women have a collection of near and dear outfits that they would happily lend to others, and in the process reduce the cost of the outfit itself. Let’s show off our sense of style, and share it too! Let’s be the Queens of our own Closets.
Our vision is to create a community where all South Asian outfits and accessories can come to play with an improved and extended life after their initial purchase. Each person can set up their own private virtual closet which can be handy at their fingertips when they need to browse their own styles for the next event - all seamlessly on their phone, without having to dig through their physical closets. Then, once you've enjoyed your outfits, you can click a button and decide to put it up for sale or rental on ClosetRaani's online marketplace when you're ready. After the outfit has had a party-ful life, ClosetRaani will connect it to upcyclers and recyclers that will help extend the life of the materials, giving it a new use case and beginning. This way the whole community is plugged into a sustainable model for clothing circularity from day 1, helping both the ecosystem and our wallets. You can track the journey of an outfit from birth to rebirth through its photos on ClosetRaani.